[ih] When did "32" bits for IP register as "not enough"?

[Ross Callon]

There was some mumbling about 32 bits not being enough as early as 1980. In 1980 there was the beginning of the effort that became CLNP. The first related proposal came out of BBN and NBS (National Bureau of Standards, which is now called NIST) in 1980 and proposed that what became CLNP should be just IPv4 with 64 bit addresses and the source quench removed, and nothing else changed other than the version. At the time BBN had a contract with NBS. This proposal was taken into ANSI bound in bright orange cover paper, which caused it to be unofficially named the “pumpkin paper”. Around the same time I privately mentioned to Vint that instead of going from an 8 bit network number plus a 24 bit subnet address to class A,B,C addresses, instead they should go to 64 bits. He said this would be too disruptive. I didn’t find out until the ROAD meetings many years later that someone else, I think probably Bob Hinden, had told Vint the same thing at about the same time. 

Of course, at the time I had absolutely no idea how to get anyone to agree with this change, and I was unaware that ANSI and ISO would be unable to get anyone to follow their standards. 

I recall the ROAD group as occurring while I was still at BBN, which I left in 1988. As such the group must have met no later than 1988. NAT was discussed. I thought that Van Jacobsen brought the idea into the ROAD group although Paul Francis was also participating, and there was someone else whose name escapes me (possibly Vince Fuller) who was also proposing NAT, and of course this doesn’t say whose idea it was originally. 

I think of CIDR as having two parts. One was just getting away from the class A, B, C restrictions. I don’t know where this came from. The other was assigning addresses topologically. I think that the topological part came later than the “no A,B,C” part. 

Bob Hinden might remember some of this. 

Ross

> On Feb 13, 2019, at 5:01 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
> 
>> From: Craig Partridge
> 
>> NAT was a product of the ROAD (Routing and Addressing) working group
> 
> Err, I don't think so. AFAICR, the IETF stuck its head in the sand for a long
> time over NAT. (Which definitely has its downsides...)
> 
>> I recall, NAT was Van Jacobson's idea
> 
> He and Paul Francis/Tsuchiya independently invented it, I think? I first heard
> about it from Van at the IAB 'addressing/routing retreat', or whatever that
> meeting was called.
> 
>> CIDR, I think, was Jeff Mogul's idea.
> 
> I don't think so; I'm pretty sure Jeff was out of the IETF world by then. Maybe
> you're thinking of his earlier document on subnetting a la MIT?
> 
> CIDR came out of the ROAD meetings, but I don't know if it was any specific
> person's? Also, like I said, it was in mechanism identical to Roki's
> supernetting thing (in fact, the early RFC's on it call it 'supernetting', not
> CIDR), although he had proposed it for a totally different reason/need (IIRC,
> he wanted a host on an X.25 VAN to be able to send packet to a host on a
> different VAN, without going through a router).
> 
> 	  Noel
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